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Wednesday, March 28, 2007
The Very Notion of Eternal Recurrence
I’m lecturing on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on Friday. I shall make the clearly correct and important point that the film is a wonderful illustration of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence. I’m also trying to draft out an essay on the subject. Here’s just the first bit, since that’s all that exists. What do you think? The one thing I’m really concerned about is this: I say scholars have overlooked obvious, early expressions of the idea of eternal recurrence in Untimely Meditations. Clearly some have. But I’ll look a bit foolish if some prominent scholar has gotten the scoop. So break it to me gently, if it turns out I’m not nearly the original creature I take myself to be. (I’ve only made Amazon links to works that are searchable inside, since sometimes that’s sort of useful, even though the books are mostly rather overpriced, and you want to just walk down to the library.)
§1. Eternal Recurrence: the Very Notion
Alexander Nehamas quotes one of Nietzsche’s letters: “There’s no one alive today who could write anything like Zarathustra.” And editorializes:
By insisting so strenuously on his unique position in the history of thought, Nietzsche may have done himself a great disservice. For he seems to have licensed the attribution to him of views which are often impossible to accept; and which are then either defended as ideas whose time has not yet come or dismissed as the thoughts of someone who was more interested in shocking than in teaching. Of none of them is this more true than of that most peculiar of his many peculiar ideas, the eternal recurrence. (“Eternal Recurrence”, in Nietzsche
[amazon], p. 118)
Although this is putting it vaguely: one of my theses will be that it is quite wrong to find the idea of eternal recurrence to be ‘most peculiar’. Accept it or reject it, but the idea is intuitive. Or else you aren’t looking at it right. Putting the point a bit more colorfully, in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche braids a new thread into that old Platonic line: learning is recollection. He claims philosophic ideas that appear arbitrary and disconnected reveal themselves, upon examination, to be orderly—necessary—elements of larger ecosystems.
The most diverse philosophers keep filling in a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies. Under an invisible spell, they always revolve once more in the same orbit; however independent of each other they may feel themselves with their critical or systematic wills, something within them leads them, something impels them in a definite order, one after the other—to wit, the innate systematic structure and relationship of their concepts. (§20)
We are all familiar with how certain basic philosophical moves and attitudes crop up again and again. It is very hard not to reinvent certain wheels. The idea of eternal recurrence, I will argue, is such a one. (Well, it would have to be, if the idea were true, wouldn’t it? But I think we should accept it is so, even if we do not deduce this from the alleged truth of the doctrine itself.) I will show the whole scheme—complete with associated figures and motifs—cropping up, in quite a different and unexpected context, yet exhibiting a surprising degree of congruence.
It might seem this style of advertisement for the doctrine would be very unwelcome to its author, threatening Nietzsche’s sense of the doctrine as a rich, strange, late fruit of his development—badge of elite spiritual achievement. But I do not think this is a sound objection. When Zarathustra complains that his animals are turning his fundamental teaching into a ‘Leier-Lied’—‘lyre song’ or (if it were not anachronistic to translate thusly) pop tune—he is saying that, in a sense, what he is teaching can sound banal and obvious.
I think until we get to the point of worrying that our exposition of Nietzsche’s fundamental idea is making it sound too obvious, therefore banal, we will not have gotten to the point of expounding Nietzsche’s fundamental idea—and a radical idea it is.
But what is the idea? Nehamas’ gloss will do for starters (so we are quite clear about what he finds so peculiar):
The eternal recurrence is most commonly interpreted as a cosmological hypothesis. As such, it holds that everything that has already happened in the universe, and everything that is happening right now, and everything that will happen in the future, has already happened, and will happen again, preceded and followed by exactly the same events in exactly the same order, infinitely many times. Each of these cycles is absolutely identical with every other; in fact, it would be more correct to say that there is only one cycle repeated over and over again in infinity. There can be no variations, and hence no interactions, between such repetitions. Everything that we are now doing, we have already done in the past (though it is impossible to remember, since that would constitute an interaction between two of the cycle’s repetitions) and we shall do so again, exactly as we are doing it now, infinitely many times. (p. 119)
In fact, it would be more accurate (Nehamas would agree) to say that eternal recurrence is most commonly interpreted as this cosmological hypothesis plus an ethical exhortation—that recurrence (whatever that turns out to mean) should be (whatever this turns out to mean) affirmed. It is the cosmological element, per above, that is received with incredulity. The a priori ‘Egyptianism’ of it all has struck many as absurd, repulsive and, what is probably worse, utterly un-Nietzschean. Nietzsche notoriously treats even the simplest identity claims as metaphysical fictions. Nothing—not me, not this apple in my hand—is ever really ‘the same’ as anything, even itself. Now both it and I are identically to recur forever?
Why (oh why?) did he leave his hammer at home just this once, to philosophize up the most outlandishly ramified metaphysical identity thesis? Then, apparently, he stood it as his idol, converting, at a stroke, his urbane, playful, pagan philosophy into a still-centered monolith; ironed out all irony; traded Montaignean wit for the inferior monotone of Zarathustra’s superiority—and the cod-Wagnerian accompaniment provided by eagle and serpent hardly compensates for the loss. (Small wonder the likes of Heidegger have seen, here, the fall back into Plato’s arms; many of Nietzsche’s followers clearly think they do Nietzsche most credit by saying as little as possible. Or perhaps they simply don’t know what to say.)
One can venture into the Nachlass, seeking support in the form of abstract, metaphysical arguments. But Nietzsche did not proclaim himself ‘teacher the of eternal recurrence’ on the basis of what he did not see fit to publish (‘ecce homo’ is not correctly translated as ‘hide your light under a bushel’.) Such arguments as have been extracted are most charitably regarded as experimental follies, intellectual doodles. The simplest version of their one-size-fits-all refutation (which does seem to fit) runs like so: even if it were true, and knowable, that unfolding events are like throws of the dice, that would prove—at most—that eventually every face can be expected to come up, given little enough world (finite set of possible states of affairs) and (infinite) time. But what Nehamas has laid out, above, is much more specific. The same faces must ever and always show in the same order. (What metaphysical spring could load the cosmic dice so elaborately?)
One might leave it at that, conceding the difficulty and proceeding to undertake repairs (insulation of the ethical side of the doctrine from as much embarrassment as seems humanly-all-too-humanly eliminable, probably by boiling cosmology down to psychology); but there is a curiously protruberant textual detail—curiously overlooked—that underscores these points, while perhaps hinting at solutions. So let us belabor the absurdity of the very notion of eternal recurrence a bit more at the start, before explaining how it all makes sense.
Maudemarie Clark’s Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy
The first period comprises, of the writings published by Nietzsche himself, The Birth of Tragedy and the Untimely Meditations. The second includes the writings of the “plowshare”: Human, All-Too-Human; The Dawn of Day; and the first four books of The Gay Science. The third period begins on the foundation of the idea of the eternal recurrence, with Zarathustra, and ends with Ecce Homo. This period alone contains Nietzsche’s genuine philosophy. (p. 23)
And here is passage from the Nachlass Löwith quotes:
Now I shall relate the history of Zarathustra. The fundamental conception of this work, the idea of eternal recurrence, this highest formula of affirmation that is at all attainable—belongs to August 1881: it was penned on a page with the notation underneath, “6,000 feet beyond man and time.” That day I was walking through the woods along the lake at Silvaplana; at a massive, towering, pyramidal rock not far for Surlei I stopped. It was then that this idea came to me. (quoted, p. 61)
But it isn’t true. Löwith’s periodization is misleading; Clark’s list omits at least one clear occurrence of the idea in a major published text. In “The Uses and Disadvantages of History For Life” (1874), Nietzsche distinguishes three styles of historicism: monumental, antiquarian and critical. Of the first, he writes:
Then of what use, to the man of the present, is the monumentalist treatment of the past, the preoccupation with what is classic and rare in earlier times? He takes away that the greatness once was there, at all events once was possible, and therefore will really become possible once again. He goes on his way more bravely, for now the doubt that descends on him in hours of weakness, whether he might perhaps be wishing for the impossible, is driven from the field. Take the case of one who believes it would require no more than a hundred productive men, raised up and rendered effective in a new spirit, to finish off the fashionable civilization of Germany; how must it invigorate him, to hold true that the culture of the Renaissance raised itself on the shoulders of a band of a hundred men.
Nevertheless—by way of promptly learning something more from the same example—how fleeting and weak, how inexact that comparison would be! How much difference must be overlooked in the process, if the comparison is to generate this powerful effect. How forcibly must past particularities be cast into a general mold, with all sharp corners and angles broken off for the sake of establishing a fit! When, fundamentally, that which was once possible could become so for second time only if the Pythagoreans had been justified in thinking that when heavenly bodies constellate identically, it means things on earth must be the same, repeating themselves down to the smallest detail and incident: so that, ever and again, when the stars come into alignment, a Stoic joins with an Epicurean to murder Caesar, and when they stand a different way, Columbus discovers America all over. Only if the earth restaged its drama, every time, after the conclusion of the fifth act, if it were certain that the same knot of motive, the same deus ex machina, the same catastrophe repeated at fixed intervals, could the man of power desire monumental history in utter, iconic truth, that is to say, with each fact rendered individually, with full individuality; presumably not before astronomers are turned astrologers once again. Until that time, monumental history will not be able to bring itself up to the fullness of truth: always will it bring together what is unlike, generalize and in the end equalize; always will it minimize differences in motives and occasions, sacrificing the causae to set forth the effectus monumentally, as something exemplary and worthy of imitation, so that, seeing as how it overlooks causes as much as possible, it would be only a slight exaggeration to call it a collection of ‘effects in themselves’, of events that will produce future effects, for all times. What is celebrated in folk festivals and on holy or military memorial days is basically just such an ‘effect in itself’. It is that which does not let the ambitious sleep, that which the brave wear over their hearts like an amulet, but it is not the true historical connexus of cause and effect, which, fully comprehended, would only prove that never again can any identical thing be cast forth as a result of the dice-game of the future, and of coincidence. [§3, my trans.]
This is unmistakably a substantive, sustained consideration of the advantages and disadvantages of eternal recurrence for life. The cosmological hypothesis is laid out, in all its speculative specificity, and Nietzsche anticipates the obvious objections. Furthermore, even though the doctrine is conceded to be nonsense, rationally speaking, there is a sense in which Nietzsche already affirms the value of monumental history—ergo, affirms the ethical centrality of the idea of recurrence—despite the danger to history of “becoming somewhat distorted, beautified, and coming close to free poetic invention;” of there being no distinction, any longer, between it and ‘mythical fiction’.
It seems to me, indeed, hardly exaggeration to say that these early essays are steeped in preoccupation with eternal recurrence. Let us skip ahead only as far as the start of the next essay, “Schopenhauer as Educator”:
A traveler, who had visited many lands and peoples and seen several of the earth’s continents, was asked what quality in men he had found everywhere. He said: they tend to be lazy. To others, it seems that he should have said, more rightly and significantly: they are all fearful. They hide themselves behind customs and opinions. At bottom every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no outlandish coincidence will shake together, a second time, such a marvelously variegated multiplicity into unity as he is: he knows it but hides it like a bad conscience—why? For fear of his neighbor, who demands conformity and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that forces the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Shamefacedness, perhaps, in a few rare cases. For most it is idleness, inertia, in short that tendency to laziness of which the traveler spoke. He is right: men are even lazier than fearful, and fear most of all the burdensome nuisance of absolute honesty and nakedness. Artists alone hate this lazy procession in borrowed manners and left-over opinions and they reveal everyone’s secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle; they dare to show us man as he is, unique even unto each move of his muscles; even more, that by strictly in consequence of this uniqueness, he is beautiful and worth regarding, new and incredible, as every work of nature, and never boring. When the great thinker despises human beings, he despises their laziness: for it is on account of their laziness that men seem like factory goods, indifferent, unworthy to be associated with or instructed. Human beings who do not want to belong to the mass need only to stop being comfortable; follow their conscience, which cries out: “Be yourself! All that you are now doing, thinking, and desiring, that isn’t you at all.”
Every youthful soul hears this call day and night and trembles at it; for it has a premonition of its eternally fated allotment of happiness, when it contemplates its true liberation: a happiness it can never attain to, so long as it lies in chains of fear and convention. And how desolate and senseless life can be without this liberation! There is no more unpleasant and adverse a creature in this world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks left and right, squinting behind him and all about. In the end, one cannot come to grips with such a man, since he is all exterior without a core; tattered, bedaubed, baggy robes, an embroidered ghost that cannot provoke even fear and certainly not pity. (§1, trans mine)
I take it this says: a condition of the possibility of an authentic sense of ethical self-worth is (curiously fatalistic) cultivation of belief in the eternal non-recurrence of the same. You can become what you are only if you are never repeatable, let alone repeated. Needless to say, this proposition does not sit in self-evident comfort, alongside the qualified affirmation of the value of ‘monumental history’. Our author is feeling his way through and around, making bold starts and stabs, some of which must be false. But that which we are feeling our way through and around is: the possibility (impossibility, necessity, actuality?) of recurrence.
Turning back to Löwith and Clark: does it make trouble for their interpretations that they miss these early occurences of the idea? Obviously we must wait to judge. I make this textual point at the start in part by way of emphasizing that, whatever one makes of eternal recurrence, one should start making it earlier, textually speaking. I commend these passages to the attention of anyone interested in the question. But I also want to say: Löwith would have been gratified to have his strong sense of the deep unity of Nietzsche’s philosophy—its ever-circling orbit around the idea of recurrence—additionally confirmed. And Clark might be gratified for a similar reason: like many commentators, she is concerned to make the sense of the ethical imperative—affirm recurrence—independent of the truth of the cosmology. Not to put too fine a point on it: she makes eternal recurrence an ethical congeries of ‘effects in themselves’—of effects of effects, actually—just as Nietzsche says the ‘monumental historian’ does. And this may be existentially necessary, as Nietzsche deems monumental history to be (for certain purposes). This might be taken as evidence that Nietzsche thinks like Clark. Or it might be that we need another turn of the screw, as I will argue. You have to come to appreciate how eternal recurrence could be (this idea is intuitive) true after all. Monumental history must turn critical - abysmally so.
Comments
Filling in a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies.....
This sounds like Foucault’s description of one form of [pre-evolutionary biology] in “The Order of Things”.
Hartshorne pointed out that Nietzsche’s system is a conservative system within which change consists only of the rearrangement of preexisting entities, so that nothing new can come into being. This makes Nietzsche into a more conventional (determinist materialist) thinker than he’s usually regarded as.
In Whitehead the initial range of all possibilities has some kind of ontological or metaphysical status, possibly the primordial nature of god. Rather than a neatly defined collection of entities limiting possibility, though, it’s a dazzling collection of all possible alternative histories in all alternative universes and I believe is essentially unthinkable, like the Buddhist “closely-packed space” which gathers everything possible, actual or imaginary, past present or future.
John Stuart Mill had a nightmnare vision that at some point all possible pieces of music had been composed and there could be no new music.
The sterility of XIXc music was actual, though not in exactly the way Mozart thought. After Schubert and Beethoven it was hard to do much with the symphony or the quartet. The cause of the steriulity was the widespread acceptance of one style as normative. Whoever partially succeeded in escaping from this Nazi straijacket (Chopin, Musorgsky, Satie) was sneered at for their naivite and incompetence.
Hey John, thanks for the one (lonely) comment to my long, laborious post.
I do think that Nietzsche is certainly a determinist materialist - he’s a fatalist, not the philosopher of free creation he is often taken to be. And there is a strong sense in which he thinks superficial novelty is always at bottom the same few elements, just wearing a new hat. This does make him conservative in that he isn’t progressive - he doesn’t believe in spiritual progress. And yet - he does. The overman. But, then again, he doesn’t.
Interesting Mill quote.
The doctrine of eternal recurrence, at least the cosmological part, isn’t “nonsense, rationally speaking.” If we assume that:
1. The universe is deterministic, and
2. The universe has, or will, repeat precisely a state it has been in previously,
then it follows logically. In Nietzsche’s day, 1) was believed true. 2) would have been more dubious, since the universe has an infinite number of possible states, but it wasn’t nonsense.
Today, of course, we believe both 1) and 2) to be false: 1) because of quantum mechanics, and 2) because of the universe’s expansion, which it is now believed will never reverse itself, if I’m not mistaken.
Has the universe’s endless expansion been established now, then? I’d thought that the jury was still out.
“(2) would have been more dubious, since the universe has an infinite number of possible states...“
A truly infinite number of possible states has ‘room’, as it were, for both an infinite number of different states and the infinite repetition of the same state. No?
I’d always assumed that for Nietzsche it was the mode-of-being-in-the-world that was the starting point (fully affirm one’s present day existence as if one were fated to experience precisely this existence over and over again for ever), and the discovery of supposed cosmological evidence that reveals that, hey, this is actually the way the universe is, came after. Which I take it is what you’re starting to engage with in your last paragraph, there, John.
I don’t see a direct connection between the quote about laziness, and the notion of the eternal recurrence, but I think perhaps there’s an indirect one. The eternal recurrence raises the question of how one affirms the totality of one’s being, a question Nietzsche answers by invoking the aesthetics of the grand style. The forging of the grand style is the achievement of the uniqueness, and is the meaning of “Be yourself!”
This is close to Nehamas’s argument in Life as Literature; anyhow, that’s how the passages you’ve quoted here connect in my view.
Adam, I totally agree that Nietzsche’s cosmology should be rejected in favor of treating the eternal recurrence as a pragmatic thinking tool.
(Apologies for the delay; I bookmarked the post as soon as I saw it but only now have had a chance to comment. Thanks for this, John.)
Oh, and do we get to see any thoughts on Eternal Sunshine?
Where’d my comment here go? I had a relatively long one I’d hate to have to rewrite.
I really don’t think Nietzsche’s thought experiment has much to do with real cosmological speculation but while we’re on that track I might as well chime in.
First, there’s at least one deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics, it’s just that it’s hidden-variable and nonlocal so it’s totally controversial.
Any universe that repeats itself infinitely would certainly qualify as deterministic but it’s possible that from within, that universe could appear totally nondeterministic. Quantum physics can’t say that the universe as a whole is nondeterministic, only that it appears to be so from our point of view. We’d have to step outside the universe to see the total laws which govern it.
Second the question of infinite states isn’t settled:
1) It might be discrete on a local scale, as I think Lee Smolin and quite a few others believe (and which I think is almost necessarily true due to the Planck length but I am no expert.)
2) It may or may not be infinitely growing: the expansion thing is not totally settled at least to my knowledge, though there are further problems raised by the theory of inflation.
Infinite expansion would rule out repeating macroscopic states, but interestingly some theories of inflation combined with discrete local behavior would mean that while the whole (infinitely large) universe wouldn’t repeat, our observable universe would be repeated, and be repeated infinitely, just not necessarily in the same place. I’m actually writing a story right now based on these theories, which presents a kind of nightmare reversal version of the eternal recurrence.
Cosmology aside, in historical reality (human history and biological evolution, for example) past states cannot reappear. This is a pretty well-worked theme (Stephen J. Gould, “Time’s Cycle, Time’s Arrow”; John Gunnell, “Political Philosophy and Time”; Ilya Prigogine, “Order Out of Chaos”; Stephen Toulmin “The Discovery of Time”; Hartshorne and Whitehead, passim) but it hasn’t seemed to have sunk in or dispersed widely either.
I actually think that this question of historicity, irreversibility, and time is one to which there is a right answer, but it seems to be treated as a subject for speculation. It is true that at cosmic and subatomic levels you apparently don’t have history, but all areas of direct human experience (biological life, human history, terrestrial geology) are historical.
Okay, the gist of what I wrote before was:
Anything introduced with the aid of a magical demon should probably not be taken as a serious cosmological schema, but instead as a thought experiment.
I always chalk fear of finitism up to a lack of understanding of combinatorics. Disregarding almost every property of music which makes it interesting, and only taking the normal scale and a reasonable finite length of time, we can take the sum total of possible arrangements of notes in time and play them back to back and it’d be several times the proposed age of the universe. We have to worry about thermodynamic heat death before we run out of music.
Almost everything we’d be willing to call a “thing” is made up of rearrangements of preexisting entities, and we don’t have to worry about the possibilities running out except in the infinite limit. So vastly inhuman a scale makes the classification of finite systems as “conservative” pedantic to the degree of ridiculousness.
Nietzsche does seem to both affirm and implicitly deny spiritual progress but the contextual distinction removes contradiction. In the infinite limit, if we’re always repeating ourselves, of course we never get anywhere. The only way this becomes a problem is if we step out of time to observe the system as a whole, from a sort of un-Nietzschean objective perspective. Within time however, we are always inside a specific lifetime of the universe and at every moment spiritual progress is possible from our perspective.
This reminds me of the distinction between infinity and “very large numbers”. There’s one point of view according to which, if something can be done in any finite amount of time, it’s “theoretically possible”. The finite amount of time might be a billion times longer than the age of the universe, but if it’s not infinity in some sense it’s “possible”.
I’ve been lobbying to designate certain sorts of very large numbers as working infinities for purposes of possibility discussions, but so far I haven’t gotten anywhere.
Yeah this sort of comes up quite a bit in mathematics, especially things like computational complexity. “Theoretically possible” tends to translate to “not disproved by the theories we’re discussing at the moment.”
Though I’m a thoroughly theoretical thinker the theme (good god how many “th"s can I fit in this sentence) of pragmatic considerations of physical implementation is something I always try to return to.
Isn’t the historical antecedent here the Stoics and Pythagoras? In fact, there is a great passage in David Ferrell Krell’s _Infectous Nietzsche_ where he goes to great lengths to differentiate Nietzsche’s formulation of the eternal return from the Stoics. I think Deleuze talks about the connection as well in _Logic of Sense_.
Thanks for the thoughts - and the Krell reference, Roger. Sorry if your comment got deleted, somehow, J.S. (I was asleep, man, it must have been someone else’s careless finger.)
The main problem with attributing the cosmological arguments to Nietzsche is that he seems so committed to NOT offering speculative, a priori arguments. (If the argument has any empirical premiss, it could only be: the world hasn’t come to an end yet. Everything else is totally unverifiable, at least from where he is sitting. And that one premiss is hardly going to carry the whole load.) Still more specifically, the problem with the deterministic reading - i.e. there is some natural law that has us stuck in a cycle - is that the hints Nietzsche gives in the Nachlass are inconsistent with it. He thinks of physical processes as, at bottom, ‘dice-throws’ - he likes that metaphor. That is, there is, at bottom, a principle of insufficient reasons. Things just happen for no reason, at bottom. Randomness. And he consistently hints that the explanation for repetition is something on the order of ‘eventually the same face will come up again, just by chance’. Yet his view is, apparently, the much more specific one that all the faces must always succeed each other in exactly the same order. Which is not really what you would expect from random, cosmic dice. Roger, yes Nietzsche thinks that in some sense the Stoics are his ancestors re fatalism. He acknowledges the kinship. And Pythagoras is right there in the passage I quote.
Jospeh, I’ll get back to you - I hope in a follow-up post - about eternal recurrence and Nehamas. I happen to think Nehamas is wrong about a lot of things, in “Life as Literature”. (But it’s a good book.) I don’t agree that we whould regard ER just as a heuristic tool, as he (and you) suggest. I don’t think that works. But it is, I concede, the majority view among scholars, and not without good reason.
The connection between the laziness quote and eternal recurrence is indirect, via the posit of eternal non-recurrence.
"Still more specifically, the problem with the deterministic reading - i.e. there is some natural law that has us stuck in a cycle - is that the hints Nietzsche gives in the Nachlass are inconsistent with it. He thinks of physical processes as, at bottom, ‘dice-throws’ - he likes that metaphor. That is, there is, at bottom, a principle of insufficient reasons. Things just happen for no reason, at bottom.“
Surely at bottom things are not so much dice throws as Will? Not exactly in Schopenhauer’s sense, but still? Or have I quite misunderstood Nietzsche?
I still think that the problem with Nietzsche’s root metaphor is that, even if it is not completely predictable or rigidly cyclic, it still assumes a finite set of entities being continually rearranged, like an enormous deck of cards being shuffled and dealt and reshuffled and redealt. Like Mill and Kant, he seems to be struggling with ideas of determinism and materialism reductionism.
The possibility of the return of past states is proposed in Western classical thinking, Vedanta, etc., and is tempting to physicists. It describes a system which is conservative in the physicist’s sense rather than politically: nothing is ever created or destroyed, just rearranged. The metaphor of running a clock backward until it reaches the past is used.
Something like this seems to be true at the most fundamental levels of physics (cosmology and subatomic physics) but not at the human scale (not for anything as big as a grain of dust or as small as a solar system.) Our experienced world (evolution, history, geological history) is historical, irreversible and never repeats, and new entities come into existence and old entities pass out of existence. (Though these experienced entities are, from the physicist’s point of view, just rearrangements of unchanging fundamental particles).
Nietzsche seemed to be trying to define the possibility of freedom and novelty within a metaphysic which denied the possibility of freedom or novelty. His solution seems similar to that of Kant and the Stoics.
Marcus Aurelius is an imperfect stoic, but he’s worth looking at. I found his system interesting but much stranger than you’d expect: Marcus Aurelius, the Cynic Emperor
Poincare came up with a theorem that proves that a finite system of particles must return to a state arbitrarily close to its initial state granted a limitless amount of time. That theorem is not exactly about eternal recurrence, but it shows that similar notions were current in the physical thinking of Nietzsche time. That noted, I guess I buy into the view that the eternal return is less a proposition offered for its truth or falsity than a way of staging a thought. Thinking of the moment as an ontological maximum is far from easy since most of the mise en scene of our metaphysics depends on the center of gravity of being occuring elsewhere--in a future, in eternity, in the realm of the ideas--or never occuring at all. The eternal return is simply a way of experiencing this world, slow spider and all, as the other world. It’s a bit like Basho’s “plunk!” Yugen.
And it does work, you know. I’ve never found a thought that is better able to give a whole bunch of undergrads the willies than a proper presentation of Nietzsche’s idea. Of course, the return is mighty dubious as physics and not only on Nietzsche’s view of things. Maybe the most fundamental of experiences isn’t even eternal. The frog is dead and gone for good.
eternal recurrence- “it holds that everything that has already happened in the universe, and everything that is happening right now, and everything that will happen in the future, has already happened, and will happen again, preceded and followed by exactly the same events in exactly the same order, infinitely many times. Each of these cycles is absolutely identical with every other; in fact, it would be more correct to say that there is only one cycle repeated over and over again in infinity. There can be no variations, and hence no interactions, between such repetitions. Everything that we are now doing, we have already done in the past (though it is impossible to remember, since that would constitute an interaction between two of the cycle’s repetitions) and we shall do so again, exactly as we are doing it now, infinitely many times.”
This is just really hard to grasp as truth. How can the universe be so perfectly fabricated as to re-create itself without any glitches, variances? Nietzsche’s ideas leave favorite american maxims such as “variety is the spice of life” hog-tied, beaten, and finally asphyxiated. The idea of eternal recurrence seems to leave no room for flexibility. What would you call the idea of eternal recurrence without the perfect duplication of past, present, and future?
John,
You’ll want to take a look at Time-Fetishes: The Secret History of Eternal Recurrence by Ned Lukacher: http://www.amazon.com/Time-Fetishes-History-Recurrence-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822322730/ref=sr_1_1/102-7480207-2396928?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1176137401&sr=8-1
Lukacher’s study provides a counter-history of the eternal return from the pre-Socratics through Derrida. The book is organized into three sections, the Ancients, Shakespeare, and the Moderns.
One crucial factor seems to have been missed by most, if not all, commentators on this fascinating subject. Time itself is a psychological construct. It is experienced and processed by conscious beings in a fluid and changing way. As such any cosmological approach to the Eternal Return misses the point. It is to psychology and neurology we should look for an explanation, not cosmology.
I propose that the Eternal Return is essentially psychological (or more accurately, neurological) in nature. I suggest that the clues to such a supposition lie within the Near-Death Experience (NDE) literature. A common factor of the classical NDE is the report that ‘my life flashed before my eyes’, similarly common is a report that individuals experience something termed ‘the Panoramic Life-Review’. I suggest that we all may ‘experience’ an eternal return’ in the final split-second of our lives. Evidence from the work of neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield suggests that all our experiences and memories are ‘recorded’ by the brain and are stored. If this is the case then these ‘memories’ may be re-generated during the final moments of life. In a Near-Death Experience they are literally fast-forwarded because actual death does not take place. In a Real-Death Experience (RDE) the recording is presented to consciousness in real-time - a literal minute by minute reliving of one’s life. This illusion is so real to the perceiver that they believe it is real (similar to the movie The Matrix). I term this illusion The Bohmian Imax.
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